REPRESENTATION – Danse macabre was based on the popular belief that the dead, as skeletons, rose from their graves and tempted the living, of all ages and ranks, to join them in a dance that brought them finally to death. Danse macabre literally represents a procession or dance of both living and dead figures, the living arranged in order of their rank, from pope and emperor to child, clerk, and hermit, and the dead leading them all to the grave. This symbolizes the all-conquering and equalizing power of death. The grim reaper spares no one, thus a king dies just the same death as a poor beggar.

HISTORY – The idea of danse macabre was originally fostered by the plagues and wars of the 14th and 15th centuries. During the Middle Ages there was a real obsession with death, mostly inspired by the epidemic of the Black Death in the mid-14th century and the devastation of the Hundred Years’ War (1337-1453) between France and England. New outbreaks of plagues often occurred, and for all the inhabitants of Europe, the fear of plague was part of everyday life. Thus amongst people arose a morbid fascination for Death. This obsession is rooted especially in the inequality of life and the final inevitable putrefaction accompanying death. The growing popularity of the mime dance and the “morality” plays undoubtedly also contributed to the idea of a “dancing” Death.

IN ART – The earliest artistic interpretations of danse macabre began in painting. It was first embodied in several murals and a poem (dating from the early 15th century) in the Church of the Holy Innocents (Cimetière des Innocents) in Paris. In this series the whole hierarchy of church and state form a stately dance, the living mingling with skeletons or corpses, which are escorting them to their final destination. The work was a stern reminder of the imminence of death and a summons to repentance. Even though the Paris danse macabre was destroyed in 1699, the Parisian printer Guyot Marchant had managed to publish a version in woodcuts and verse, which was circulated throughout much of Europe. All later works on the theme of danse macabre were derived directly or indirectly from the Paris murals. The Dance of Death also frequently appeared in friezes decorating monasteries (most often in the open courtyards, which usually contained cemeteries) and in the naves of churches.

One of the most famous works inspired by the theme of danse macabre are a set of 51 drawings produced from 1523 to 1535 by the German painter Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein’s danse macabre is divided into separate scenes depicting the skeletal figure of death surprising his victims in the midst of their daily life.

IN POETRY – Before the theme of the dance of death became popular, there was a literary genre (of French origin) called Vado Mori (I prepare myself to die), which was a short poem written in Latin. This tradition dates back to the 13th century. In these writings, representatives of various social classes complain, often in no more than two verses, about the fact that they will soon have to die. In the oldest versions of texts of that kind, there was a prologue underlining the certainty of death and, following this prologue, the last verses of eleven dying men (the king, the pope, the bishop, the knight, the physicist, the logician, the young man, the old man, the rich, the poor and the insane).

After the popularity of Vado Mori diminished, the literary versions of the Dance of Death took their place. This includes a famous Spanish poem La danza general de la muerte, which was inspired by the verses at the Innocents and by several earlier German poems. Late Renaissance literature contains references to the theme in varied contexts. Much later, the 18th-century German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote verses on the subject. The French poet Charles Baudelaire also wrote a poem entitled Danse Macabre (see end of page)

IN MUSIC – In music, the Dance of Death was performed frequently in compositions associated with death. Mimed representations were performed in Germany, France, Flanders, and the Netherlands. In the 14th century a form of the Dance of Death emerged in Germany, the Totentanz. This was a danced drama with the character of Death seizing people one after the other without distinctions of class or privilege.

One kind of dance peculiar to the Middle Ages was the dance of St. Vitus, believed to be a interpretation of the danse macabre. It was originally an ecstatic dance performed by masses of people and it dates from the 11th and 12th centuries. People congregated at churchyards to sing and dance, even though the representatives of the church tried in vain to stop them.

The St. Vitus’ dance became a real public menace, seizing hundreds of people, spreading from city to city, mainly in the Low Countries, in Germany, and in Italy during the 14th and 15th centuries. It was a kind of mass hysteria, a wild leaping dance in which the people screamed and foamed with fury, with the appearance of persons possessed. In these convulsive, frantic, and jerky dances, religious, medical, and social influences probably interacted in response to such things as the epilepsy-like seizures of persons suffering from the Black Death. At one time Italy was afflicted with “tarantism,” an epidemic presumably caused by the bite of venomous spiders. Its effects had to be counteracted by distributing the poison over the whole body and sweating it out, which was accomplished by dancing to a special kind of music, the tarantella.

The theme continued to attract attention also in later periods. Notable musical interpretations of the theme include Totentanz (1864) by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and Danse Macabre (1874) by the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.

Eventually, the concept of the Dance of Death lost its hold in the Renaissance, but the universality of the theme inspired its revival in French 19th-century Romantic literature and in 19th- and 20th-century music.